“Sicily,” said Goethe, “is the key to everything."
I love travelling to other countries, especially those with a vastly different history to Canada's and I have just returned from a two week hiking trip on the island of Sicily. While there, we entered a cave that contained rock etchings that have been carbon dated at 12 thousand years old and cave paintings (created by combining charcoal and animal fat) dated 7 thousand years old. The archeological records reveal colonization by humans around 16,000 years ago. And then there were the Phoenicians, the Greeks (750 BCE and includes warring peoples from Syracuse and Carthage), Romans, Germans (469-535 CE including Visigoths, Vandals, and Ostrogoths), Byzantines (535-965), Arabs (827-1091), Normans (1038-1198), and the Kingdom of Sicily (1198-1860 during which the French, Spanish and English came and went.) All of them left behind an imprint of their time on the island and ancient ruins are everywhere across the island. And don't forget about the WW II Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. As I stood on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, I felt I could feel Odysseus (Ulysses) waiting in the harbour for the winds to fill the sails of his ships so he could continue his journey home.
It is not that I take comfort from all the fighting and destruction among the peoples of history, but rather the evidence that humans have (somehow!)survived and continued. While it's so unfortunate that we don't seem to learn our lessons from our history, I do have faith that we will find a way forward from our current miseries. Angela Davis believed (and she should know) that hope is a discipline to be practiced.
